The day Andrew Tate's girlfriend claims she came out of the shower to find him raping her young friend

Andrew Tate has been known to try to pass off his misogyny and his systematic humiliation and degradation of women as just ‘an act’. But allegations of rape and grooming suggest that his performance was all too real, and pulls the rug from underneath the ideology driving his movement.

When we returned to the UK after confronting Tate at his headquarters in Romania for our television documentary exposing who he really is, we received a flurry of emails from women who had known him at his home town of Luton back in 2015 and 2016. Their stories were all similar.

They were in their early 20s when he’d approached them, either online or through a male friend who claimed he was ‘friends with Tate’ and recruiting ‘models’ for his new business. When they were put in touch and spoke to him, he would switch between flattery, control and insults, calling the girls beautiful one moment, then making demands or calling them stupid.

None of these women actually met Tate or went through with his proposals of work. All of them felt ‘something was up’.

But then we were contacted by a woman who claimed to have been Andrew Tate’s ‘girlfriend’ (she placed the word in inverted commas herself) in 2015. Sally, as we will call her, told us that she was 19 when she first met Tate. They messaged on Facebook, and he eventually asked her out for a drink.

She recalled: ‘He was really, really cocky, like you see how he is now, but he could also be quite nice and sweet.’ After a successful date, they continued their relationship, which is when, Sally told us, he mentioned his pornographic webcam company, in which girls performed online for paying customers.

Tate bragged that he was making huge amounts of money running the company out of a studio in a luxury penthouse apartment with his brother, and he promised her that if she worked for him, he could make her incredibly rich. She wouldn’t even need to sleep with anyone, he said – all she’d have to do was perform by herself on webcam.

Sally had never done anything like this before, but she was young and in a minimum-wage job, and the proposition sounded interesting. Tate told her that, with her good looks, they would both make huge amounts of money together ‘as a couple’.

Sally agreed, and Tate took her to a pub to loosen her up with alcohol before her first show. They then went to his ‘luxury apartment’, which turned out to be a dingy two-bedroom flat above a Londis mini-market.

On that first night she got a glimpse of what was to come. ‘We were just sitting on the bed and completely out of the blue Andrew punched me in my arm. I went to the bathroom and cried, but when I came out he was super, super nice.’ She was confused, not knowing what to make of Tate or the situation she was in. He persuaded her to quit her job and work round the clock on webcam. She didn’t leave his flat for three days. He told her not to message her friends and that, as his girlfriend, she would no longer be able to speak to any other men.

Tate had told Sally he had an existing successful webcam business, but there were no other workers when she arrived in the flat. After a couple of weeks, new girls began to arrive. They would be split up, she said, either ‘managed’ by Andrew or his brother Tristan, and the girls would be required to sleep in their respective manager’s bed.

Sally claimed that Tate started to abuse the girls verbally, ‘calling us lazy hoes, dumb hoes, stuff like that’, but quickly progressed to using physical violence. ‘I saw him smack girls with a belt because they wanted a lie-in,’ Sally went on, her voice cracking.

‘He used to strangle us, choke us, and not in a sexual way. It was completely random. He would just grab you by the neck, or come into the room and say something like, “Which bitch am I gonna strangle today?”’ Sally recalled a time when Tate strangled her so badly the blood vessels in her eyes burst. Tristan was kinder to her than Andrew, but according to women we spoke to he too could be deeply unpleasant to his own ‘employees’.

One memory that stood out for Sally was Tristan roaming the flat wearing a pirate hat and wielding a plastic sword that he would hit the women with, bragging that he was ‘captain of this money ship’.

Sally had been working for Tate for around six weeks when he brought in a new young woman we’ll call Helen – someone Sally recognised from school. As one of ‘Andrew’s girls’ she was required to sleep in the bed with Sally and Tate between cam sessions.

However, unlike Sally, Helen had a boyfriend and refused Tate’s advances. For her, it was strictly about the money: the £15-an-hour wage seemed attractive to her, despite the fact that Tate himself would regularly earn £500 for each of their online sessions. But, Sally recalled, to her horror, waking up in bed with Tate and Helen one morning, before going to the bathroom to shower. ‘When I came back, I saw him raping her.’

Helen left the house almost straight away, but Sally stayed for a bit longer. ‘I didn’t want to work for him but I needed the money.

I suggested to him and Tristan that I could work from home but I’d still give them a share of the money. They just laughed at me, called me a dumb hoe, saying this was their business, and they had trained me, and they would not let me leave. Then one day, I was really tired, and I didn’t want to webcam, and Andrew threatened to “beat the s*** out” of me.

‘That’s when I knew I needed to get out of there.’

Sally put us in touch with Helen, who over the phone confirmed the allegations of physical violence and verbal abuse before recounting that day ‘when he raped me’. She burst into tears before hanging up the phone.

In a subsequent call, she explained that it was still extremely difficult to talk about what happened, and in addition that she was dating someone who wasn’t comfortable with her even mentioning it.

She said that a few months before, as Tate was becoming famous, she’d tried to share her story on TikTok, only to find hundreds of Tate supporters abusing her and then reporting her account to the site managers, leading to it being removed.

Helen didn’t think she was in a place to be able to go on camera for our documentary, but she was keen for Sally to speak publicly about what had happened to them both. Sally recounted her and Helen’s story in a filmed interview, having decided that she would not allow herself to be intimidated by Tate and his followers.

There had always been questions around Tate and his behaviour towards women, particularly the ones who ‘worked’ for his webcam company, but here was someone giving us a direct and detailed account of physical and sexual abuse.

It was amazingly brave of her to agree to go public, speaking out against one of the most famous men on the internet, whose fans had a reputation for harassing his critics online. She was determined. ‘I want people to know what he did to us,’ she said.

We asked Sally if she had reported Tate to the police. She told us she had phoned the specialist Metropolitan Police division that dealt with rape investigations and an officer had interviewed her at her home. But nothing further came of it.

Helen also reported her alleged rape, to Hertfordshire Police, and in the summer of 2015 an investigation into Tate was opened. He was arrested for questioning, but then released.

A year went by, and Sally was phoned by the police with some bombshell news – Tate would be appearing on the reality TV show Big Brother. She was horrified. How could its producers agree to have him on? Although Tate hadn’t been charged at this point, and there was no way that the allegations would have shown up on any checks during the show’s casting process, Hertfordshire Police confirmed with us that once they knew Tate was on the show, they had contacted the production company, Endemol Shine, and informed them of the ongoing investigation into Tate.

The producers decided to keep Tate on the show for a further five days, during which he was shown playing truth or dare in the hot tub and kissing a topless female contestant. They then removed him from the show for undisclosed reasons, relating to events ‘outside of the Big Brother house’.

The press reported that his ousting was linked to a video that had surfaced of him slapping his ex-girlfriend, and Tate himself endorsed this version of events, releasing a video on Facebook of the woman saying that it was all part of a consensual kinky game. Public outrage simmered down.

Here was an early example, pre-dating his real rise to fame, of Tate’s ability to spin public narratives in his favour. Despite being removed from Big Brother due to an ongoing police investigation for rape and physical assault, he had the public believing it was because he had made a ‘consensual’ bondage video with his ex-partner. Sally and Helen were angry with the Big Brother producers for confronting them with their abuser by putting him on one of the biggest shows in the country, but their real frustration lay with the police.

The two women had filed their criminal complaints with the police shortly after the alleged events occurred in 2015, then undergone police interviews.

They had handed over their phones for inspection (a common police demand at the time for sexual-assault survivors) and shared their sexual health records because both alleged that Tate had given them a sexually transmitted infection. Yet it wasn’t until almost four years later, in July 2019, that the police passed their cases on to a lawyer at the Crown Prosecution Service, who would choose whether or not to proceed with a charge and take the case to court.

Astonishingly, the CPS decided not to prosecute, even though it is extremely unusual to have a witness in rape cases, namely Sally witnessing Tate raping Helen.

When we asked the CPS why, they told us the case ‘did not meet our legal test, and there was no realistic prospect of a conviction’.

The whole experience had left Sally and Helen devastated. Sally ended our interview with a message to Tate’s followers: ‘All these young men follow him and think he’s such a great guy, and he’s their idol. There are better role models out there. Don’t be fooled by all the money and the nice cars and all the women. Real men don’t lay their hands on women.’

We put Helen’s and Sally’s allegations to Tate via his lawyer. Tate, unsurprisingly, denied all of them and accused Sally and Helen of wanting money because he fired them. He considered the CPS’s decision not to charge him as evidence that ‘I am innocent’.

Yet we were receiving more reports from women who had been abused by Tate. One of them – we’ll call her Amelia – told us she grew up in Luton and had known Tate since 2009. After bumping into him at a nightclub in 2013, they started dating. Amelia was 20 – seven years younger than Tate at the time – and had only been in one serious relationship. Tate was sweet at first, she said.

‘I can understand why people find him funny because I did for years. And that’s very enticing: an intelligent, tall man who’s a kick-boxer. Why would you not want to spend time with him?’

But she always knew he had a horrible side to him, which emerged the first time she went to his flat. They were kissing on the bed and he told her he was debating ‘whether I should rape you or not’. Suddenly, he grabbed her neck and ‘started strangling me, screaming “Take your effing trousers off, bitch.”

‘I was scared. I’ve never been strangled before. I didn’t know if he was going to stop. Whenever you think about being in that situation, you think you’re going to fight back. But I’m telling you, you don’t. Because if you fight back, what else is he going to do to you? He’s a 6ft 2in champion kick-boxer, for God’s sake.’

Amelia said Tate then raped her, saying things like: ‘Who do you belong to?’ and ‘Say my f****** name, otherwise I’ll kill you.’

Amelia was traumatised, but desperate to not see herself as a victim, so she says she agreed to see Tate again, only for him to rape her again, this time in a parked Range Rover he told her was his ‘rape van’. After this, she broke things off with him.

In a series of text messages she showed us, she asked him, ‘What do you get from me hating it?’ To which he replied: ‘Because I’m a terrible person. And I love raping you. And watching u let me while still debating if it’s a good idea or not.’

There were voice notes in which Tate said: ‘The more you didn’t like it the more it turned me on.’ In another, he said: ‘Are you seriously so offended I strangled you a little bit? You didn’t pass out. Chill out.’

He sent her a video of him breaking a baseball bat over his shin, along with a message to remind her ‘of the calibre of man I am. I am one of the most dangerous men on this planet. Sometimes you forget exactly how lucky you were to get f***ed by me. Don’t forget, I’m a bad boy.’

It wasn’t until 2014, about six months after the first alleged rape, that Amelia filed a complaint with Bedfordshire Police. She told us that the ‘police were horrible’ and claimed they asked the friend she brought with her if Amelia had ‘learning difficulties’. This, she said, made her feel unable to pursue the claim. Instead, she opted to ‘log it’. She then moved to a different town to get away from Tate.

Then, one day at work, she was sitting at her desk when she heard the distinctive voice of her alleged rapist on one of her colleagues’ phones. Amelia froze. ‘Who is that?’ she asked. ‘Oh, it’s this guy called Andrew Tate. He’s really big on TikTok.’ Amelia was in disbelief. ‘He just kept appearing everywhere. I couldn’t even go on social media without seeing his face.’

As Tate’s fame grew over the coming months, Amelia’s mental health worsened. But after seeing Sally go public with the allegations, she felt emboldened to go public, too, wanting to stop the same thing from happening to other women. ‘When I saw he’d been arrested in Romania, I was relieved,’ Amelia explained. ‘But I was also so, so angry with the police here. Sally, Helen and I gave them all this evidence and yet they let him get away with it.

‘He was able to just go on with his life, hurting however many more girls.’

What is doubly concerning about Tate’s activities is that he has schooled many other men in the same activities – evidence of which came from a young woman in the US who contacted us last year. ‘Amanda’ (not her real name) was 19 and working at Starbucks when she met ‘Ryan’, a seemingly successful and handsome older man, almost 20 years her senior.They spoke online for months, he seemed sweet and charming and eventually he asked her out on a date. ‘He picked me up and we went straight to a hotel. We didn’t have dinner. We didn’t get drinks. Didn’t chat basically at all. He shoved me onto my knees and had sex with me for hours. It felt pretty horrible.’

Ryan then suggested she work for him on webcam and he pestered her to agree, ‘selling me this idea of how great it would be and how good I would be at it’.

Eventually, Amanda gave in and he introduced her to another man, ‘Eric’, at whose house she did the webcamming.

She was allowed to keep 20 per cent of the money she earned, with Ryan and Eric splitting the other 80 per cent. ‘They made me work eight to ten hours a day, and if I had what they considered a “bad day”, Eric would take out his anger towards me in physical ways.’

Both men, she said, were members of Tate’s War Room, his global network of ‘alpha males’, and ‘I’m pretty sure that they learned all this from him.’ They constantly spoke about Tate as the man they aspired to be like, the man who had made millions doing exactly what they were doing.

According to her, they were constantly on their phones to other members of the War Room, discussing ‘their girls’.

We asked if she had any idea how high up Ryan and Eric might be in the War Room or whether they were just paying customers. Amanda told us: ‘Pretty high up, I think. Ryan would talk about how he was a master at this [webcamming] and he taught other men how to do it. Ryan had loads of pictures of him and Andrew together. If you asked him, he was like his best friend or one of his brothers.’

After some initial hesitancy, Amanda told us more about her abusers, referring us to the Instagram account of Ryan (real name Jonathan). This identified him as a former US Air Force pilot, who described himself as ‘Builder of Men. Master of Logistics. Weaver of Legends. Craftsman of Dreams.’ His account had an emoji of a bicep and a wad of dollars.

We knew him as ‘Money Pilot’, one of the War Room’s most senior generals. Our suspicions were confirmed. If the War Room was teaching men Tate’s methodology of misleading and recruiting women for online sex work, it could be one of the largest grooming networks in the world.

How far it reached was demonstrated when we were contacted by 22-year-old ‘Maria’ from Argentina. She too fell for ‘a cute guy’ who lured her into a relationship and then suggested making a page for her on the OnlyFans website, from which they could both make money.

She began making content, but she never controlled the account or knew the password, and she wasn’t allowed to keep any of the money – all of which smacks of the Andrew Tate playbook.

She alleges the man became increasingly controlling and was sometimes violent. ‘I remember not being able to see my friends, not being able to go out to parties, or even the park.’

Maria sent us a photo of the man from his Instagram account, showing him next to Tate at a high-end restaurant. He was also a member of the War Room and he took her to a War Room event at a luxury penthouse in Buenos Aires, where men in their 30s and 40s were all accompanied by young women, like her, in their late teens and early 20s.

She was led to believe that the War Room was a positive thing – a club where men could hang out and network with like-minded individuals. But as she came to find out more about Tate, and as the relationship became more abusive, she broke off contact.

But, through us, she wanted the world to know what the men of the War Room were being taught by Tate: ‘They find a woman and try to make her fall in love with them. And once they are in love and they have control over this person, they use it for their profit.’

Footnote: In March 2024, Bedfordshire Police force announced they were investigating the Tate brothers for alleged crimes of sexual aggression between 2012 and 2015 in the UK. The alleged victims in this investigation are new, the alleged crimes previously unheard of.

The Romanian authorities have approved the extradition of the Tate brothers, pending the conclusion of their trial there, meaning they will eventually have to face court in the UK.

© Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea 2024

•  Adapted from Clown World by Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea (Quercus, £20) which will be published on September 26. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 12/10/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.